“Come round! Let her come round—or square. Turning one out like that—at an hour’s notice and all about nothing. They’re a cad crowd anyhow, and as the old chestnut says—you can’t look for anything from a pig but a grunt. But even they may find their own turn come next. Old Carstairs’ job isn’t such a cocksure business, but very much ‘up to-day down to-morrow.’ I’ve heard him say so himself many a time, and give instances of it too.”
“Well dear, it’s a rum world, and to quote another moss-grown chestnut—you never know your luck. Now I’ve got a notion things are going to turn for you, and in a little while you’ll be all on the up grade.”
Melian did not answer. Even the up grade indicated meant a dreary vista of unceasing drudgery, giving the best of her life—her young life—to the totally unappreciated service of other people, and that for a mere living wage. Surely she was cut out for something rather different. But her friend would not allow her to get into a despondent vein. She switched the topic of conversation off to other matters, and her efforts were rewarded, for the invalid forgot the standing woes and grievances, and being of an imaginative temperament, soon found herself talking brightly, and even laughing. Decidedly here was a marked improvement, concluded the watcher, thankfully.
In due course, and exactly to the time Violet had calculated, came a letter. The girl’s eyes brightened as they lit upon the Clancehurst postmark on the large square envelope, and she could only just restrain herself from rushing into her friend’s room, after the early morning postal delivery.
“Melian, here’s a letter for you,”—throwing it down on the bed.
“Letter? What? I’ve no one to get letters from—unless it’s another from that silly little booby, Dicky Carstairs,” she added bitterly. “Only, how should he write to me here? Oh, I suppose it’s only one of the deferred answers to one of my applications. ‘Will write and let you know.’ You know the rigmarole—‘Mrs Stick-in-the-mud is exceedingly sorry’—and all that sort of thing. Well, let’s see.”
The while Violet had been on tenter-hooks lest the other should spot the Clancehurst postmark, and perhaps decline, in her absurd pride, to open the letter at all. But Melian tore open the envelope leisurely and listlessly, and then her brows contracted as she took in the contents of the large square sheet—and the excited watcher saw a flush of red suffuse the sweet, delicate face. This was what she read.
“Heath Hover, Near Clancehurst.
“My dear Melian,—
“I am deeply distressed, and more than glad at what I hear about you; the first that you have been so ill, the second that it has given me the opportunity of coming into touch with you at all. I had no idea where you were—I have not been very long back from India, remember—and neither you nor anybody else has ever communicated with me, or given me any information at all with regard to you. But I am only too thankful that now—though late in the day—I have such.